Bryan Garner is my hero.

I have a grim confession to make: I am addicted to reading reference books.  For fun.

I am ready to come out as a guilt-ridden reference-book reader now, finally, because I’ve finally found a reference book that is undeniably cool (well, at least I think its coolness is undeniable): Garner’s Modern American Usage.

Before I found Garner, the reference books I recreationally used most often were fairly drab — mostly piano literature texts, to be honest.  I am sorry to say that I know Maurice Hinson’s Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire far too well.  I’ve read about pieces I have utterly no interest in three or four times now.   For example, did you know that Artur Schnabel’s “Piece in Seven Movements” (yes, that Arthur Schnabel — he composed a bit, and his music’s remained mercifully obscure) is “a lengthy, involved work reflecting the influence of Schoenberg”?  That it “requires the most advanced pianism and mature musicianship”?  I do, alas.  I used to try to justify my endless re-reading of Hinson by telling myself that I’ll seem amazingly smart one day when someone mentions the Schnabel “Piece in Seven Movements” casually in conversation; or when someone brings up Akira Miyoshi’s “Chaines” and I recite on command, “Flexible tempos, motivic development, harmonic richness, well-planned formal scheme, emotional appeal.”  That, by the way, is a direct quote from Hinson — a representative passage, unfortunately.  Hinson’s just not a good writer.  ”Flexible tempos” tells us something, at least; the rest of the sentence is more or less drivel.  Not to mention the redundancy of the phrase “well-planned formal scheme” — schemes imply planning, I think.  Sigh — I wasted too much time reading such silliness.  And I’m still waiting for someone, anyone, to bring up Miyoshi at a cocktail party.  Not happening.

But I am proud to self-identify as a Garner devotee!  First of all, he is very funny.  Take, for instance, this sentence from his entry on naiveté: “*Naiveness is an artless anglicization created by simple, unaffected people deficient in worldly wisdom and informed judgment.”  Delightful!  His trenchant and insightful critical mind shows its stuff in the most unexpected places; for example, I’d never have dreamed that a reference-book entry on the word “only” could be this entertaining:

A paltering ‘only’ sometimes reflects doublespeak.  Consider the signs that, beginning in the mid-1990s, appeared at American Airlines gates throughout the United States: ‘Beverages only in main cabin.’  The airline is saying that while first-class passengers will get both meals and drinks, coach-class passengers will get only drinks.  If the sign read ‘Meals only in first class,’ the syntax would work pretty well, but the majority of passengers (in coach) would be miffed.  If it said ‘No meals in coach class,’ the sense of upset would only intensify.  If it said ‘Only beverages in coach class,’ the sense would be right — but once again the coach passengers might feel as if they were being shorted.  So the sign-writers changed ‘coach class’ to ‘main cabin’ (a kind of euphemism) and then worded the sign as if it were an honor being bestowed: ‘Prizes only for the winners.’  ’Jackpots only for the lucky few.’  ’Beverages only in main cabin.’ It sounds as if everyone else on board must do without: no drinks for those in the cockpit or in first class.  But of course that isn’t so.  First-class passengers don’t complain about the sign because they know they’ll be fed and get all the drinks they reasonably want.  Coach passengers don’t complain because they don’t think through what the sign really means.

I thought it worthwhile to quote the whole passage to demonstrate that Garner’s Modern American Usage is more than a reference book .  Everywhere you turn you find observations worthy of the best essayist and witticisms worthy of the finest humorist — and, naturally, very good prose.

Consider the Lobster contains David Foster Wallace’s rave review of the first edition.  The piece is called “Authority and American Usage,” and in it DFW explains his own position (as well as Garner’s) in the so-called “usage wars.”  The conflict — as described by Garner, too, in an introductory essay called “Making Peace in the Language Wars” — is between prescriptivists and descriptivists: the former make a business of telling people how to use the language; the latter seek only to describe how it’s used in myriad ways out in the world.  Both can be caricatured very easily — the prescriptivist is prudish, tweedy, conservative, insufferable; the descriptivist is an aging hippie, a “cool” academic, liberal.  Both factions clearly need makeovers, and Garner and DFW present themselves as model revamped prescriptivists: thoughtful and diplomatic; the sorts of people who take pleasure in language for its own sake; not conservative in the thoroughly misleading contemporary political sense, but in a deeper sense that has more to do with temperament and sensibility.

Garner’s conservatism is most apparent in one of the guide’s signature features, the “Language-Change Index.”  This feature typifies his approach, which he characterizes as prescriptivist in ideology but descriptivist in technique.  The Index tracks trends and rates them on a scale of 1 to 5 — usages condemned to Stage 1 are “Rejected,” those awarded Stage-5 status are “Fully accepted.”  (Garner’s “Key to the Language-Change Index” at the beginning of the volume is hilarious: he proposes an “olfaction analogy” [Stage 1 is "foul," Stage 5 is "neutral"] and an “etiquette analogy” [Stage 1 is "audible farting," Stage 5 is "refined"], among others.)  An entry accompanied by an Index rating of 1 is usually straightforward in its disapproval; but, as the accompanying rating inches higher, Garner gets more and more wistful.  He can see his position getting weaker, the forces of change overtaking a tried-and-true Standard English convention — but he knows he is powerless to stop it.  If I was depressed to see “it’s misued for its” assigned an Index rating of Stage 3 (“Widespread but . . .”), I can’t imagine how Garner must feel about its endangered status.  (Or should that be “its’s endangered status”?)  The Index is his way of giving a pseudo-descriptivist snapshot of the language as it’s used right this instant while reserving the right, as the author of a style and usage guide, to give advice about what’s best.

He sets just the right tone throughout.  You never feel like an idiot for turning to his book for advice; he’s not waiting for you with stuffy, grumpy consternation, frowning with spectacles perched on the end of his nose.  He’s more like a friend who gives good-natured feedback and some great laughs.  He views his readers as allies — and he’s right to, I think.  After all, if you buy a usage guide, you probably really do care about good prose.  He knows not to waste page after page preaching to the choir.  But, above all, he knows that good prose is not merely a technical end in itself; that it’s part of a nexus of closely-related intellectual virtues such as clarity of thought, precise expression, civility and even-handedness.  What fun it would be to sit down with Garner and take a red pen to the many polemical political columns in print these days!  (I’m constantly surprised by the number of negative examples Garner draws from distinguished publications like The New York Times.)

His politics, by the way, are hard to discern.  His article on sexism proposes gender-neutral language that doesn’t call attention to itself (he is, as most rational people are, anti-PC); his article on the word gay does express some sadness that the word’s original meaning is now null and void (see also Fry and Laurie’s hilarious sketch on this particular subject), but also recognizes that it’s a very good thing for homosexuals to have a word for themselves that’s neither clinical (like “homosexual”) nor pejorative (like, I don’t know, “poof”).  There are no entries on “liberal” or “conservative” — nor, for instance, is there one on the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  Of course, the fact that his real-world politics are indiscernible is another huge plus.  In my experience, Americans are pretty closed-minded about such matters — a political liberal is unlikely to trust a political conservative’s opinion on just about anything, and vice versa.  So Garner is wise to stay out of the fray.  (There might be some vague truth to the notion that prescriptivism corresponds more to political conservatism and descriptivism to political liberalism, and I can see how it would have unquestionably been true maybe fifty years ago.  But it’s also true that prescriptivism à la Garner is a brainy business, and conservatives today tend to be anti-intellectual.  I can’t imagine, for instance, Palin approving of Garner — she’d certainly find him elitist.  After all, her unintentional neologisms [most recently, "refudiate" -- which, outrageously, has been named word of the year by Oxford American Dictionary] would doubtlessly be condemned as “needless variants” by his standards.  The refudiate kerfuffle was an instance of prominent conservative apologists taking the descriptivist side in a language debate.  Go figure.)

I’ve strayed into politics because I often think of politics when I’m reading Garner.  Specifically, I think about what a great mind and temperament he has for it.  He’s diplomatic, cautious, sensitive, erudite but not judgmental, gentle but firm, principled but pragmatic.  So I guess I’m not only saying that Garner’s Modern American Usage is an incredible book that everyone interested in English prose should keep around; I’m also saying that Bryan Garner is a new hero of mine.  We need more like him.

Books

December 12, 2010

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Back to Blogging

I had to take a month-long hiatus from writing here because I got crazy-busy.  It was a good month — I got to play some wonderful music with some amazing musicians, and I saw and heard some fantastic performances (more about those shortly).  I also wrote two long academic papers, one each on Kurtág and Fauré.  Those projects also demanded a lot of attention and pretty much exhausted my writing chops.  I finally finished those a couple days ago, and am looking forward to posting here again!  Stay tuned!

Blogging

December 6, 2010

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On David Foster Wallace

Consider the Lobster (2005)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
David Foster Wallace

I’ve been meaning to these two books for a couple weeks now.  They’re my first DFW, and I think they’re stunning and vitally important.  But I find the very idea of writing about DFW intimidating.  His work is so detailed, with so many nested layers of self-consciousness, that it’s hard to break out of his spell and find a sincere way to talk about his works.  Writing a couple paragraphs about him is like writing a couple paragraphs about an intimate friendship — you’re worried that what you write is going to be unworthy, or trivializing, or simplifying.  In DFW’s case, this worry is compounded, because trivialization and simplification seem to be things he is absolutely against.

One of his ongoing concerns, I think, is authenticity — specifically, authenticity in the wake of post-modernism.  I’m justified in calling it ongoing because it’s all over Consider the Lobster, whose essays are written over the course of a decade or so; and it’s the central theme of another essay of his I’ve read, “E Unibus Pluram.”  This latter seems especially significant, as it’s long (well, that’s not so unusual in DFW-land), it was written pretty early in his career, and it deals directly with fiction-writing, which he considered his life’s work.

In “E Unibus Pluram,” DFW takes a close look at certain typical products of (then-)contemporary American culture — artifacts such as television ads and hipster novels — and then tries to sketch out a new way forward.  He sees post-modernism as a cultural Pandora’s box.  For instance, he shows that TV ads are appealing to their audience in very complex and sophisticated ways.  The pitch is no longer: “hey, buy my product because it’s better” or “hey, here’s a name you recognize.”  It’s more like: “I get you, I know that you’re too sophisticated to be part of the crowd mentality precipitated by see-through pitches like, ‘hey, buy my product because it’s better’ or ‘hey, here’s a name you recognize.’  But I also know that you know that that’s what advertising is all about, and now you know that I know that you know.  So let’s laugh about it a bit, huh?  We can stand apart and ironically remark upon the crowd together.  Then you’ll see that I get you and you’ll want to buy my product.”  This seems convoluted, but DFW shows that this is pretty much exactly how certain TV ads work.  This means that the average American circa 1993 (“E Unibus” was written sometime around then) understands all of this on some unconscious level — in other words, that reading subtexts and motives, reading things ironically and almost post-structurally, is a given.  Advertisers — who, after all, only follow the sway of the market — had to stop making ads about products’ respective virtues and had to start making ads about, umm, advertising.  DFW shows that a lot of TV works this way — it starts to become about itself, much as the typical post-modern novel is largely about itself.  Post-modernism is thus the cultural norm — and DFW thinks it’s poison.  He wants a way back to authenticity, back to a time when cliches can be trusted.  His ongoing search for what’s real, rather than for hip irony or dazzling imagery, is what a lot of his writing is about.  He’s the perfect author for a reader who’s learned to distrust almost everything and is looking for something to believe in — despite the odds.

Most of the essays in Consider the Lobster are proximate to this cluster of themes and concerns.  Among the many compelling essays in the collection is a long piece on John McCain’s 2000 campaign, “Up, Simba.”  One gets the sense that DFW desperately wants to believe in McCain.  Near the beginning, he recounts in detail exactly what McCain went through during Vietnam — the whole Hanoi Hilton/torture story.  He sees this as an almost textbook example of honor, an example of such ethical purity that it transcends the post-modern image making and spin of contemporary politics.  The essay consists of DFW attempting to reconcile that vision of McCain with the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes strategizing that are an inevitable part of campaign politics.  He rides the bus with the legions of reporters and staffers, observing their ridiculous and hectic routines — the daily hustle-bustle of making the 24-hour news cycle keep spinning and percolating.  Near the end of his week with the campaign he gets exactly the sort of moment he’s been waiting for — an intense and earnest moment in a town hall meeting in South Carolina that “happens” to play right into the campaign’s hand.  After a week of “going negative” after baiting by the Bush campaign, this single moment gives McCain the chance to redeem his image.  McCain succeeds, brilliantly.  But what percentage of that moment is real feeling, and what percentage stagecraft?  DFW needs to know, and it’s basically unknowable.

The essays in Consider the Lobster hint at the unknowable over and over again.  In the title essay, DFW turns abruptly from a specific carnival-like event — the Maine Lobster Festival — to animal ethics.  The essay becomes surprisingly philosophical, and slightly uncomfortable, as it edges towards a fundamental question: what is pain?  His honesty in this essay is what makes it pertinent and convincing.  Observations that would seem preachy in other hands come off as the efforts of a singularly sophisticated and self-critical human being to live well.

That essential moral question — how to live well — is the cornerstone of the series “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” interspersed throughout the eponymous collection of stories.  What’s troubling about these men is how normal they all seem.  It’s only after some prying questioning (the questions themselves are never revealed, a bizarre but effective structural choice — these “interviews” in fact read like monologues) that their hideousness comes to light.  It’s the very last of these interviews — the penultimate item in the volume — that I found the most dazzling and devastating.

The volume is full of devastation.  It’s violent at times — emotionally violent, that is.  Part of the project of some of the stories seems to be to shock the reader into some sort of moral realization.  This reminded me over and over again of Flannery O’Connor, whose stories similarly go straight for the gut.  “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a classic example, and I wonder if it’s not the secret prototype for a lot of the writing in Brief Interviews.

Of course, the contents are pretty heterogeneous and therefore hard to generalize about.  Brief Interviews includes such diverse items as “Church Not Made with Hands” (a high-concept piece — which, frankly, I couldn’t crack — that reminded me of the early Modernists) and “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” (a bizarre spoof mixing Hollywood culture with ancient mythology) — and “The Depressed Person.”  The latter is one of the best in the book, although it’s a horrible chore to read — pages and pages of dense, solipsistic, miserable prose.  But it depicts depression perfectly — how could it be anything but a chore to read?  Coming fairly early in the volume after a series of shorter, generally lighter numbers, “The Depressed Person” ups the ante, as it were — but the breaking point of the book is “Octet,” a piece that comes about halfway through.  It starts as a series of “pop quizzes” framing difficult moral dilemmas, but it soon falls apart.  Suddenly DFW himself appears (or seems to appear), and it’s as though he’s talking directly to you — asking you what he should do next.  He’s concerned that his project is failing, and he admits confusion about his motives: “How exactly the cycle’s short pieces are supposed to work is hard to describe.  Maybe say they’re supposed to compose a certain sort of ‘interrogation’ of the person reading them, somehow. . .”

It’s impossible to turn back after this — Pandora’s box is opened again.  The next story, “Adult World,” starts off as a typical psycho-sexual drama — but it changes abruptly right at the crucial moment, becoming DFW’s outline of how he’ll write the rest of the story.  It’s as if he decided it wasn’t worth completing in detail, or he couldn’t maintain the illusion.  Like “Octet,” it’s a sort of failure of narrative voice — a “failure” that reveals more than a “success” would have.

A kind of shrill cruelty dominates the last part of the volume — the last four pieces in particular.  “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon” is a long, deranged rant by a dying man; “Suicide as a Sort of Present” is about as difficult as it sounds; the last of the “Interviews” I’ve mentioned above; and the last installment of another series, “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders,” a brief snapshot that I found totally horrifying.

Brief Interviews drained me.  It’s so scary — not in the horror movie way, but in a dark, existential way.  And it’s so difficult — not in the James Joyce way, but in a way that upsets your way of seeing the world.  These books ask questions and pose riddles that seem so obvious and so important that I’m surprised no one else dare bring them up.  Or maybe I’m not so surprised — what DFW took amazing reserves of courage and clear-sightedness.  I wish he hadn’t died — he had so much to say.

Books

November 8, 2010

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(Untitled)

(Untitled) (2009)
Directed by Jonathan Parker

I’m so glad this film exists.  For starters, it’s hilarious and supremely well-written; it reminds me of a top-shelf Woody Allen comedy.  It’s also a scarily-accurate portrait of the avant-garde music and art world — I say this as a member and participant in that world.  The central character, composer Adrian Jacobs (portrayed brilliantly by Adam Goldberg), is uncomfortably familiar.  I know four or five people who could have directly inspired his persona.

I’ve glanced at some reviews, and I’m pretty surprised at how so-so the critical reception was.  It’s telling that I hadn’t heard a thing about it until a fellow New Music character posted an enthusiastic recommendation on (sigh) Facebook.  Its appeal is limited.  For instance, one of my favorite lines is from a dinner party scene following a premiere of a piece by Adrian.  One of the guests is talking about how he misses melody in new music, and longs for harmony, and Adrian interrupts with a sigh:

Come on, it’s obvious that harmony was just a capitalist plot to sell pianos.

This line had me in stitches.  It is complexly funny — that is, funny for about a hundred different reasons.  But only a couple of those reasons are easy to explain to non-musicians.  The movie’s full of such zingers — lines only slightly different from those I hear everyday in conversation, but different enough that they point out how close to absurdity it all is.  To paraphrase what I wrote in my Dal Niente post about Mark André: sometimes it feels like the only choices are laughter or tears.

If the caricature were even a bit more pronounced, (Untitled) would still be funny — but nowhere near as relevant.  It’s not just a one-sided take-down of the pseudo-intellectual avant-garde.  Its other targets include boringly gullible art collectors and the vapid world of corporate art.  (Adrian’s brother is an artist striving for greatness, but whose atmospheric but decidedly blah work is bought up en masse by hotel chains.)

Two specific plot points near the very end surprised me — on further reflection, they totally sold me on the movie.  I want to discuss them, but be warned: they might be considered spoilers.  (By the way, spoilers don’t bother me — I’m not a very plot-oriented person, and I still enjoy films and books a lot if I know exactly what’s coming next.  In fact, I often enjoy them more — knowing the plot ahead of time affords you more opportunities to appreciate other aspects of the work.)  But, if spoilers bother you and you don’t want to read on, please go rent the movie.  It’s worth your time.

• At a concert, Adrian overhears an elderly famous composer having a nasty exchange with a critic.  After the critic leaves, Adrian asks the composer, “How do you put up with that all the time?”  The wizened composer responds, “You have to find joy in the process itself.”  Then we see Adrian later that night, sulking and poking at his keyboard.  Little by little he gets rapturously involved in the sounds he’s making, and then there’s a montage of him composing late into the night.  (The music here, presumably by Bang on a Can’s David Lang, is very lovely indeed — he also deserves, umm, credit for the clever music that plays during the closing credits.)  But the film leaves it at that.  I was so worried that it’d be revealed that the music he composed that night was his breakthrough, that we’d next be shown huge, appreciative audiences.  For all we know, Adrian could have woken up the next morning, decided what he’d written was pure folly, and thrown it out.  The moment is pertinent because it tells us something about Adrian — he’s not just an iconoclast raging in a vague and ineffectual way.  He’s a real artist who gets deeply involved in what he’s creating, in the sound itself — at least at certain moments.

• In the very last scene, a stranger (a sallow youth serving appetizers) tells Adrian that a concert we’d seen early in the film had “changed his life.”  He says this totally unironically.  The original event had been something of a farce, with lots of arm clusters, bird calls, and weeping clarinetists.  But the film is wise enough to admit that even this might mean something to somebody, in a totally earnest and unaffected way.

Films, New Music

November 4, 2010

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John Luther Adams in conversation with Alex Ross

John Luther Adams in conversation with Alex Ross
October 28
Lutkin Recital Hall, Northwestern University
Evanston, IL

Since this is my third post about an event at Northwestern University, I thought I’d take this opportunity to say that I’m not a student at Northwestern, nor do I hold a degree from the school.  I happen to live fairly close by, and they happen to host many interesting events.

John Luther Adams was recently named the third recipient of Northwestern’s prestigious Nemmers Prize for Music Composition.  The Nemmers is a high honor, indeed — the winner gets $100,000, and all that the school asks in return is two weeks of residency.  JLA is the fourth recipient, following Kaija Saariaho, Oliver Knussen and John Adams.  (That is, the other John Adams — the guy who wrote Nixon in China and Phrygian Gates and Shaker Loops.  JLA is a very different composer.)

It’s very appropriate that Northwestern brought in Alex Ross to interview JLA, since Ross has written about him in The New Yorker.  Indeed, if you visit johnlutheradams.com, the first thing you see (besides a stark and characteristic outdoor photo of the composer himself) is an Alex Ross quote.  Ross’s just-released book, Listen to This, includes the JLA profile — as the whole audience in Lutkin a few days ago learned, when Ross began the “conversation” by cracking open the book, hunching over it and reading a couple paragraphs.  This struck me as very odd: you bring in two pretty famous guests to have a talk, and the first thing that happens is that one reads something he wrote about the other years ago from a volume you can easily pick up at the Barnes and Noble down the street.  (Ross’s books are big sellers.)  Things got weirder when this was immediately followed by the screening of about seven minutes of a documentary about JLA, consisting of the composer talking while pretty images of Alaska are flashed across the screen.  Why did Ross elect to begin the session this way?  As a means of plugging his new book and the soon-to-be-released documentary?  (“Look for it in theatres soon,” he said — I wanted to call out, “What theatres?”)

All of this is to say that Ross is something less than a gracious and affable host for such an event — a fact I found surprising as a reader of his works.  His first book, The Rest is Noise, is an impressively accessible (in a good way) and concise history of 20th-century “Classical” music.  Every musician is going to have little qualms with such a tome — for instance, I found the emphasis on the minimalists near the end tiresome.  But the sweep is there, and the book sold very well — more than one can say of any  similar volume.  His writing prove that he’s a masterful communicator, but his live appearances suggest that his talents are more suited to the page than the stage.  He’s not exactly charismatic, and some of his questions for JLA were winding and murky.

JLA himself has a warm, good-natured presence.  He played several clips of his music during the conversation, clips that were I found uniformly enticing.  I left the session wanting to hear more of his work.  I just wish the conversation had been more engaging.  Instead, it slid into familiar grooves — inspiration vs. intellectual planning, JLA’s influences, JLA’s early roots in rock, the generic pro-eclecticism promo.

A word about eclecticism, as this is not the first time it’s reared its head on this blog.  I’m not against it — quite the contrary.  What I’m against is the adopting of it as a universal standard.  JLA’s bio in the program for the conversation (why the conversation needed a program, I’m not sure) begins, “American composer John Luther Adams came to music as a rock drummer.”  The fact that he opens his bio with this, rather than other more unique and pertinent sound bites, betrays the fact that the gesture towards eclecticism has become a required part of the form.

(I’m also against aesthetic relativism.  Sure, eclecticism has a huge amount of room to maneuver before it must confront that bugbear.  But I do worry that, in talk of eclecticism, aesthetic relativism is the hidden premise, the larger implicit understanding which contains the rest of the discourse.)

The most obvious tidbit JLA could lead his bio with is his long-term residence in Alaska.  He expressed mild resentment about his status as “the Alaskan composer” — but the chilly Alaskan air and the open Alaskan landscape is certainly front and center in his music (certainly more central than his touted early obsession with Zappa).  It’s music that takes its time to develop.  Its slowness and massiveness have something in common with certain minimalist works (and also with certain pieces by Messiaen), but the effect is very different.  Only one of the pieces exhibited anything resembling the typical driving minimalist pulse — and that piece was for drums alone.  His music tends to be far more pictorial and meditative.  What’s intriguing to me about JLA’s music is how it creates this atmosphere (using a predominantly diatonic language) while avoiding a sound that’s “ambient” or new-agey.  This is quite a balancing act, and I’m not positive he always succeeds.  Certain bits he played bordered on the saccharine.  But it seems this is a risk he’s willing to take, and there’s something very respectable and earnest about his efforts.  Turn the commercialism dial up just a little and it becomes the cheesy “Nature Reflections” CD in those wooden kiosks in Wal-Mart.  Hopefully I’ll write more about his music in the future, once I’ve had a chance to hear some complete works.

Two remarks JLA made will stick with me.  One was about his process.  He says that he works out as much of his pieces as possible in his head, without writing anything on staff paper, until the moment when it feels like his head literally can’t contain it anymore, and the music has to spill out onto the page.

He also used the word “sublime,” specifying that he meant it in a specific 19th-century sense: describing the razor-thin edge between beauty and terror.  In this meaning, it’s closely related to awe, a sensation familiar to anyone who’s spent time in beautiful wilderness surroundings.  The capturing of awe, and of that sort of “sublimity,” seems to me a very worthy and lofty goal for one’s music.  I hope I find it in his music.

New Music

October 31, 2010

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Richter: The Enigma

Richter: The Enigma (1998)
Directed by Bruno Monsaingeon

“[Sviatoslav Richter's] personality was greater than the possibilities offered to him by the piano, broader than the very concept of complete mastery of the instrument.”  — Pierre Boulez

As is very frequently the case, Maestro Boulez is exactly right.  (Assuming he actually said this — my only source for this quote, I am sorry to confess, is Wikipedia.)  Richter’s talent was so enormous that the piano and its literature — which so many of us spend our lifetimes toiling to master — couldn’t contain it.  He was, in short, one of the greatest geniuses in the instrument’s history.

The other day, I watched Richter: The Enigma, an incredible documentary on his life and art, for probably the fourth time.  I first saw it about ten years ago, when I was studying piano with a fairly well-known Russian pianist, a brilliant musician who was a rabid fan of Richter.  He loaned me piles of rare Richter recordings — as well as this wonderful film.  I hadn’t listened to Richter before.  Getting to know his playing for the first time changed the way I thought about the piano.  I was hugely influenced by his power and authority, his sublime extremes (of fast and slow, of pianissimo and fortissimo), and, of course, his sound — sometimes steely and brash, sometimes intensely concentrated and innig, once in a while blooming into the most extraordinary bel canto.

As I began my adventures in higher education, under the tutelage of different but equally-brilliant teachers, I drifted away from Richter.  I started to think of his playing as unrefined and one-sided as I came to know and love other sorts of playing: the lofty (if sometimes stodgy) intellectualism of Schnabel, Kempff, Badura-Skoda, Brendel; the propulsive athleticism of Kapell and the young Fleisher; the fastidious colors of Perlemuter and Aimard; the overripe Romanticism of Rubinstein and Horowitz; and, of course, the old masters such as Cortot, Rachmaninov, Hofmann, Friedman.  Rejecting your past obsessions seems to be a part of growing up, especially when you’re a teenager. Richter came to seem emblematic of “the Russian school,” an approach to the piano I believed I was moving beyond, and so I went years without really listening to him.

A cluster of coincidences led me to fall back under his spell recently: I ran across a couple online videos, his name came up in conversation.  I decided to re-watch the documentary, and I realized I had Richter wrong.

“I am not a complete idiot, but whether from weakness or laziness have no talent for thinking. I know only how to reflect: I am a mirror . . . Logic does not exist for me. I float on the waves of art and life and never really know how to distinguish what belongs to the one or the other or what is common to both. Life unfolds for me like a theatre presenting a sequence of somewhat unreal sentiments; while the things of art are real to me and go straight to my heart.” — Sviatoslav Richter [the source is again Wikipedia, alas, but I can't find this quote elsewhere and it is too good to omit]

In the latter part of his life, Richter always performed with the score — which, you may be aware, is highly unusual for a solo concert pianist.  In the documentary, the interviewer asks him about this, and Richter replies (I’m paraphrasing here): “I play with the score because it is impossible to remember every detail of the score . . . if you can’t recall the details, you begin to interpret — and I am against that!”  These quotes indicate that Richter saw himself as a conduit for the score, for the composer’s voice.  This explains much about his playing: the clarity, the austerity, the straightforwardness, the bold colors. It’s powerfully expressive pianism, but the expression seems to arise from the music itself, not from Richter.

I’ve been revisiting a gigantic box set my parents gave me when I was in my first Richter-mania: a collection called Sviatoslav Richter in Prague.  Many of the recordings on this set are invaluable.  My listening so far has focused on the first five CDs, which are devoted to Beethoven.  Nowhere is Richter’s control and cool-headed restraint more evident than in Beethoven slow movements.  And no one plays them better.  The very first recording on the set is of the early C major Sonata (Op. 2 no. 3).  This Sonata is frequently played by young pianists who sound as though they’d rather do anything but play a slow movement, so I am accustomed to careful but dull renderings of its rather lengthy second movement.  Richter presents the opening theme patiently, with a gorgeous singing tone.  When the music abruptly swerves into e minor (the movement opens in E major), Richter creates a disquieting hovering effect that is chillingly foreboding.  Finally, about two minutes in, the trombones come in, fortissimo; here Richter veritably redefines the word subito.  It is like a huge void opening up: frightening, overwhelming, impersonal.  The tempo doesn’t flinch.  The effect is hypnotic (a word that Richter seems to provoke frequently) and profoundly mysterious.  Perhaps this uncanniness is the natural byproduct of the fire of Beethoven’s music reacting with the ice of Richter’s objectivity.  Like most truly great musical phenomena, it is impossible to describe.  And you can listen in vain to every other great Beethoven pianist, from Schnabel to Richard Goode, and not find anything else like it.  Is it hyperbole to suggest that Richter might be the one recorded pianist whose greatness of soul matches that of Beethoven?

It’s ultimately Richter’s greatness of soul that saves his objective stance from sterility.  This is why he’s so hard to imitate.  Most of us would just sound dull and/or crass if we tried to play like him, because we lack his most essential qualities — his seemingly infinite capacity for concentration and his intense commitment to the music.

His greatness also transcends his nationality.  True, one can hear a bit of “the Russian school” in the muscularity of his sound; but remember that his artistry has been a known quantity for over fifty years now, so it’s hard to tell which is the cause and which the effect.  Even if he did get some of his tone quality from his brief training with Heinrich Neuhaus, calling Richter the typical Russian pianist is something like calling Glenn Gould the typical North American pianist.  (Plus, Richter’s father was German, as he explains in the documentary.  He describes being told, “you’re a German!” by the Russians, and “you’re a Russian!” by the Germans.)

I’ve been showering praise on Richter here, and I feel that such hero-worshiping prose must get tiresome to read.  So I want to mention that Richter is far from consistent.  The Prague recordings are all live (Richter didn’t particularly care for the studio), and not all of them are him at his best.  It’s amazing how often the very elderly Richter in the documentary recalls some important concert and refers to his performance on that occasion as “bad.”  Some of this is simply the self-criticism of an uncompromising artist.  (Discussing instruments, the interviewer asks, “What do you require of the pianos you play?”  Richter replies: “I require more of myself!”)  But some of it is just honest — Richter’s muse was a fitful one.

And his fingers weren’t pure steel — they were human and they slipped.  He has a reputation for incredible technique, but it’s worth recalling that playing as inaccurate as his would never pass in a contemporary international piano competition.  The same is true of any number of earlier greats: Horowitz and Rubinstein, not to mention Cortot and Schnabel.  But neither Richter’s errors nor the errors of these other greats impedes the flow of the music itself.  Contemporary competition pianists often compensate for their lack of conception with unimpeachable technique.  Richter, by contrast, aimed for a breadth (he claimed to have 80 solo recital programs in his repertoire, without repetition) that made perfect accuracy humanly impossible — but the scope of his repertoire refined and deepened his voice throughout his career.

He performed on the concert stage until he was about 80.  He misses more notes than ever in the late recordings — and I don’t care.  Why should I, when he occasionally draws a sound out of the piano that makes me want to dissolve in tears?  His recordings are filled with such moments.  What a remarkable legacy.

Films, Pianists, Recordings

October 28, 2010

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Ensemble Dal Niente: How About Now?

Dal Niente 2010 Season Opener
October 13
Mayne Stage
Chicago, IL

Anthony Cheung, Centripedalocity; Eliza Brown, Uneasy (world premiere); Marcos Balter, Growth; Nico Muhly, How About Now; Michel van der Aa, Rekindle; Mark André, Asche; Hans Thomalla, Momentsmusicaux

I often think that in music (maybe in all art, in fact) one plus one equals three, not two.  In other words, the juxtaposition of two musical objects creates a third “thing” — namely, a relationship between the two objects.  I’m sure we could have a prolonged debate about whether or not this relationship is itself a “musical object”; indeed, we could have a prolonged debate about what constitutes a musical object.  I’ll temporarily sidestep these debates by framing the issue once more, this time in terms of semiotics: the relationship between two musical objects bears at least as much semiotic weight as the objects themselves.

This is a portentous way to begin a blog entry, and in my mind’s eye you’re reaching for a bottle of Advil as I write this.  But it turns out that this issue came into play, in several different ways, at the Dal Niente† Season Opener.

In fact, it was literally spelled out as an idée fixe during the “chat with the composers” at intermission.  Of the seven composers whose works were played that evening, four were present — Cheung, Brown†, Balter†, and Thomalla†.  Brown eloquently explained that one of her intended areas of exploration in Uneasy was the recontextualizing of musical objects to create extremes of contrast.  The other three composers spoke about the way their pieces used quotations from older music in diverse ways.  As I’ve expressed before, I have serious doubts about the wink-and-a-nudge postmodern embedding of shards of historical detritus into a fragmented musical fabric (see my post on Ensemble Alternance).  Happily, there was none of that in Cheung’s, Balter’s or Thomalla’s work — the borrowed materials were incorporated very organically; and Brown’s exploration of contrast was well-wrought and compelling.

Now, the creation of a program is itself an artistic process, precisely because of the “1+1=3″ principle: when you put two pieces of music side-by-side, you are creating a relationship between them.  (Certain artists and composers have made this issue front-and-center in their work.  György Kurtág’s ongoing collection of tiny piano pieces, Játékok, is the perfect example.  On their own, many of these pieces can seem trivial; sequenced skillfully, they gain meaning; strung together masterfully, as in Kurtág’s own recitals, they become sublime.)  The co-existence on this program of music by Mark André and Nico Muhly was troubling to me — in fact, I’d say that the relationship between How About Now and Asche was the most artistically challenging part of the event.  (Disclaimer: I am in no way indicting DN for programming these two pieces the way they did.  I think it’s a fascinating and disquieting move, and I just want to unpack what it suggests and speculate about the reasons the Powers That Be in DN may have had for doing it.)

To justify this thesis (alas, this is looking more like an essay than a blog post), I must first describe the my impressions two pieces in some detail.  But I must warn that my impressions were colored by the venue, the Mayne Stage.  Nestled snugly in a not-so-nice area of town (the area is somewhere between Okay and Bad, depending on the time of day), it’s an unconventional setting for a new music concert.  Consider, for instance, that a waiter took my order as I listened to Muhly.  My beer arrived during the van der Aa, and my glass was empty by intermission.  Consider also that one of my tablemates clinking the ice in her whiskey glass at one point during the André totally drowned out the music coming from the stage.

Such a setting favors the music Muhly writes, I think.  Imagine that Stravinsky somehow got a hold of a recent Steve Reich piece and had his way with it — the hypnotic pulse characteristic of Reich’s language broken up, the music fragmented into little tastes, like musical tapas.  I like some of Reich’s early works very much, especially the tape and phases pieces; but it happens that what makes these works so compelling is the way they subject an expressive, human element (bits of spoken words, live performance) to an almost cruelly mechanical process.  The chasm between the materials and the processes is what gives these works their curious sense of tension, their elusive rhetorical power.  As Reich’s moved away from that, I’ve found his work less and less compelling.  Muhly’s work (and the work of many of the composers writing in the so-called “post-minimalist” idiom) I find less interesting still, as it diffuses one of the few remaining sources of tension and propulsion in Reich’s later work: the pulse.  What one is left with is pulpy bits of pop played on Classical instruments, which sounds like either lame pop or unexciting Classical.  Artistically, I find it watery.

Conceptually, André is anything but watery, but the sound is thin indeed.  A long stretch near the end of the piece consisted chiefly of one of the players rubbing together two blocks of styrofoam, very slowly.  There are only two possible responses to this: laughter or tears.  It is either absurd or it isn’t — better yet, it is either comically absurd or tragically absurd.  The latter is André’s stated goal: his program notes say that he wants to put the performers and the listeners in an “existential situation.”

I wish he hadn’t written this.  I read this note before I heard the piece, and I felt several things at once.  I felt resentful that André was trying to provoke his own existential dread/despair/alienation/whatever-emotion-he-applies-to-his-existential-sense in me, which is a grim thing to wish upon one’s audience.  I have my own problems, thank you.  But I also felt that, in order to experience the piece, I needed to make a good-faith effort to feel like I’m in some sort of existential situation.  This is vague, so instead I found myself picturing Sartre with his head in his hands at a café smoking a cigarette and drinking black-as-death coffee.  “This is probably all wrong,” I thought (though the image of Sartre at the café was now stuck in my mind’s eye), so then I decided to just forget the whole thing and listen.  But now André had given me a clear criterion by which to judge him, or his piece, or myself: if I didn’t feel I was in an “existential situation” as I listened, then something had failed somewhere along the way.  This is why I don’t like prescriptive program notes.

So, here’s the thing: if André’s piece succeeds in creating an “existential situation” for the listener (it didn’t succeed for this listener, but the circumstances may have contributed to that), then it creates a sort of vacuum or black hole that starts to devour the music around it.  Thomalla’s piece, which immediately followed, was not at risk, as it is about as philosophical as André’s (“Can a note become alienated from itself?”, his program note rhetorically wondered).  The piece most at risk was Muhly’s.  If André succeeds, then Muhly fails.  If André fails, then Muhly has a chance at succeeding.  Either one or the other is absurd, when juxtaposed like this.  I can’t imagine an aesthetic universe in which both are equally successful.  (Granted, this may be a failure of imagination on my part.)

I’m inclined to think that DN realized that these two pieces are mutually nullifying, in which case they may have crafted the program to be a kind of artistic riddle.  If so, they are brave, as it means that inevitably one piece or another will “fail” in each individual listener’s mind.  The possibility I’d rather not entertain is that this juxtaposition is some gimmick, an attempt at branding.  It’s very trendy for new music ensembles to call themselves “musical omnivores.”  Eclecticism is très hip, after all.  Unfortunately, eclecticism can’t be maintained under extreme circumstances, at least not without resorting to pure aesthetic relativism — a slippery slope, as that stance endangers not only the entirety of “Classical” music but all music and all art.  The last possible with regard to DN’s programming is that they were abjuring all artistic responsibility and trying to play the part of the disinterested curator: here are some things in our collection, make of it what you will.  The problem with this is one that I think a lot of people have written about or discussed: no curatorial act is disinterested or unbiased.  Everything involves selection, which implies either conscious or unconscious thought.

Since I like DN, I’m going to stick with the first possibility.  I also see one compelling piece of evidence in this interpretation’s favor: their placement of André after Muhly.  This is the less obvious thing to do.  Had they put Muhly last, the audience would have walked away with a smile on its face and a spring in its step.  André would have seemed obscure and comically absurd in retrospect, like a bad dream that makes no sense when remembered in the light of day.  The existential questions would have turned out to have been nightmares; everyone would have felt comfortable.  But DN’s program order wasn’t the comfortable one.  They gave Asche the space on the program to exercise its power to the fullest: an admirable risk.  I hope DN continues taking such chances.

Concerts

October 25, 2010

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Anonymity and disclosure on this blog

I feel the need to lay a few ground rules for myself about how, exactly, this blog is going to work.  I imagine the majority of people who read this will be people who I invite — they’ll obviously know that I’m the author.  Other people I know who happen to stumble upon this blog will probably be able to deduce who I am.  However, when it comes to readers I don’t know out in the Real World, I want this blog to remain semi-anonymous.  That’s why my full name is nowhere in sight; it’s also why I’ll not be advertising this blog far and wide via facebook, etc.  (“Semi-anonymity” is a tough status to maintain, but we’ll see how it goes.  I’ll try not to post anything so outrageous that it endangers my career in the Real World should my identity ever become an issue [which is unlikely].)

I’m also concerned about the etiquette of writing informal reviews, appreciations, etc. of people or organizations I’m personally acquainted with.  This is something I’d like to do — for instance, I’d like to post shortly on the first Ensemble Dal Niente concert of the season, and EDN is a group I’ve worked with quite frequently, and I’m friends with many of the core members, etc.  I want to alert my readers to these possible conflicts of interest, but I don’t want to make a pretentiously big deal about it.  Therefore, I’m instituting a sign.  If you see ‘†’ next to the name of a person, that indicates that I know that person in the Real World.  If you see it next to the name of an organization, that indicates that I’ve had something to do with that organization in the past.  The meaning of this sign is recorded in a section called “about this blog.”

Blogging

October 21, 2010

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Thomas Hampson in Masterclass

Thomas Hampson: Art Song Masterclass
October 19
Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Northwestern University
Evanston, IL

I came to this class with a bias against Thomas Hampson.  I’d seen clips of him singing the arias baritones sing, all done in his distinctive smooth way.  Last New Year’s Eve, I caught a bit of his concert with the NY Phil.  I happened to flip to the station at intermission, which Live from Lincoln Center almost always uses as an opportunity for mini-interviews with the artists.  So they were talking to TH about Cole Porter (he was about to sing a Porter set), and TH was getting more and more intellectually and rhetorically convoluted.  The subtext seemed to be, “See, I am thoughtful and have considered various intellectual stances towards Porter, the last thing I would want to do is dismiss him as mere popular fluff; I know better because I am one of those enlightened ‘hip’ ‘Classical’ musicians.  But, having thought long and hard about it, I have decided that it’s best not to over-think this music; it needs to be urbane and witty, and over-thinking would squash those qualities.  But I still want you to know that I never presumed to under-think it,” etc.  If this already seems exhausting, rest assured that the performance was still worse: all this baggage (“I respect this music even though it’s not ‘Classical,’ I admit it’s emotionally complex, yet I have decided to be spontaneous and suave,” etc. — of course, deciding to be spontaneous and suave requires feats of mind control that I can’t quite imagine) weighed down the performance and made it feel labored — ironically, as he was artificially lightening his voice to avoid exactly that sort of ponderousness.  (For more on the artificial lightening of operatic voices, see Renée Fleming, Dark Hope.)  I found that this huge cloud of self-conscious cleverness he created totally obscured Porter, so that all I could think about as I watched was TH and his enormous ego.

His song class wasn’t all that different — at every turn, he managed to eclipse the students he was there to teach, while his objective as a masterclass teacher probably should have been to spotlight the young talent onstage.  But I admit that I was incredibly compelled nonetheless, because TH is such an overwhelming character; listening to him, one feels a bit like Hans Castrop in The Magic Mountain listening to the pompous and obscure Dutchman Mynheer Peeperkorn — Castorp can never make head or tail of what Peeperkorn says, but always ends up exclaiming, “My God, what a personality!”  TH’s obscurity doesn’t reach Peeperkorn levels of incoherence; but the major impressions I took from the class have nothing to do with Schumann, Schubert, art song, or the student performers.  They have to do with TH.

Where to begin.  Since this is a blog post, and blog posts are, as an idiom, supposed to be relatively brief, I have to forgo attempting a full Psychological Profile of the Major American Baritone.  So I’ll confine myself to the first segment of his class, in which he held forth at such extravagant length and in such baroque terms that my head was reeling.  If you’re one who frequents masterclasses, please know that this sort of theatrical exposition is highly unusual.  I’ve never seen anything like it before.  Often the presiding teacher will give a few warm words of welcome to the audience and student, but TH’s flamboyant performance resembled a Shakespearean soliloquy in its drama and scope.  Maybe the connection to the Bard comes to mind because TH is in town playing Macbeth in the Verdi opera.  Or maybe he’s in high Shakespearean mode because of his current immersion in said production.

TH charmed us (the audience), he hectored us, he threw scraps of foreign languages our way.  (I don’t care who you are, sine qua non sounds pretentious when said out loud.)  He indulged in parentheses and parentheses within parentheses.  (To be fair, I like parentheses and digressions, too, but I feel that the standards for such liberties ought to be much stricter onstage than on-page.)  It was all very impressive and imposing, and within two minutes of the long speech (I didn’t keep an eye on the time, but I imagine the entire thing ran about 15 minutes) I was feeling sincerely sorry for the poor Northwestern kids who were about to take the stage.  I imagined them waiting in the wings, listening to all this and feeling increasingly woozy and trepidatious.

What was the burden of these opening remarks?  Well, there was some talk of the nature of Art Song, how it’s a hybrid art form made up of poetry and music.  How we’ve become too quick to focus on the composer and ignore the poet.  How, as a whole, we (= the modern concert audience, I guess?) have devalued Art Song, in favor of noisier genres (the symphony, the opera, etc).  How this contemporary neglect is symbolic and/or indicative of the plight of the humanities as a whole.  How we must fight for the humanities.  Yes, he really got that general — indeed, his cultural critique extended still further, as he talked about our culture’s addiction to speed.  We need to slow down, we need mental space, etc.  It’s all very noble, but somewhat familiar, no?

At least he admitted that it all may be familiar, that “great thinkers have said what I’m saying more economically.”  He quoted a couple people openly — or semi-openly: he once made a point about a composer’s work being “a record of life in their time and place” or some-such; about a spoken paragraph later he backtracked to attribute that point to Copland.  I think it’s characteristic that such gestures, which might have suggested intellectual humility, ended up feeling more like literary name-dropping in his windy delivery.  He referenced Joseph Campbell several times, accompanying his final out-and-out endorsement of Campbell’s books with a warning: “From him it’s easy to go on to Jung and so on and so forth; and then you’re in a whole world of pain.”  The audience tittered at the Great American Baritone using such a flippant expression; but it occurred to this audience-member, at least, that we Untutored Masses were being subtly condescended to.

That may be the wrong way to put it.  Perhaps, as he sees it, TH studies and thinks for us all, and he embodies what he’s learned.  He’s not just a pretty voice; he’s an auteur, a polymath.  As such, we need not try to keep up with him; we only need trust him.  One of the most interesting things he said (repeatedly: both in his introduction and to many of the students individually) is that one shouldn’t Show It, one should Be It.  (“It,” presumably, being the expressive essence of the music, or something equally ill-defined or undefinable.)  If the artist tries to Show It, the focus on communication creates the risk of debilitating self-consciousness.  True enough.

He used the popular prism metaphor for the interpretive process.  The interpreter captures the focused light of the composer’s inspiration and diffuses it far and wide to the audience, exposing the brilliant colors inherent in the inscrutable beam.  A lovely image, but my impression of TH himself is somewhat different.  The audience, the students, Schubert, Schumann, Heine, Cole Porter; all these seem to exist just to illuminate TH’s infinitely subtle and richly faceted subjectivity.  He lets light in but he doesn’t let it out.

I wonder if TH is aware that the “Be It” approach comes with its own risk: solipsism.

Masterclasses

October 21, 2010

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Ensemble Alternance

Ensemble Alternance
October 11
Regenstein Hall, Northwestern University
Evanston, IL

Raphaël Cendo: Affront (world premiere), Furia; Mark André: iv 2; Philippe Leroux: ppp; Gérard Pesson: Mes Béatitudes

Ensemble Alternance, according the blurb printed in their program, is a group whose “goals include developing, integrating, and exploiting the chock of temporal passages as well as cultural and new instrumental rotations in the vast expanse of music of our time, and to confront these with works from the recent past.”  I’d like to hear how they’d unpack the meaning of this sentence; in particular, the metaphorical “chock” is obscure — frankly, it’s lost on me.

Their playing, however, was superb.  As a pianist, I particularly appreciated Dimitri Vassilakis’s relaxed virtuosity; he’s the sort of the artist who casually brushes the keys and out comes a beautifully-voiced chord.  The cellist also deserves mention, as he presented the 10-minute-plus solo work by André brilliantly.  That I wasn’t entirely convinced by the piece (see below) had nothing to do with his gripping and focused performance.

All of the works on the program were by young-ish Frenchmen — ranging from Pesson (born 1958) to Cendo (born 1975).  It’s a musical language I’m far from conversant in — for instance, I’ve heard recordings of the Leroux and Pesson pieces before, and I had encountered only one Mark André piece prior to last night.  I had seen none of them live — indeed, I’ve seen no music by any of them live and had never even heard of this Cendo character.

My opinion of “this Cendo character” is simple, so far (meaning, until I hear more by him).  His music struck me mere provocation, the noise and fury of a composer whose Angry Young Man period has… hmm, outlasted the composer’s youth?  This was true of Affront throughout (aptly named!).  The latter part of Furia was somewhat different — a lapse into an aural trope familiar to new music listeners, which I think of as moths trying to escape a tar pit.  Something low and dark and ominous and wet, something else fluttering to be let out.  Anyway, the moth finally gives up the struggle, sinks into the ooze — symbolized here by the cellist lowering his C string…

André’s piece had me hooked for a while, until an unfortunate open-string ricochet section that went on far too long.  There he lost me entirely.  I found the effect simply not interesting as material — I’d found earlier bits quite interesting, but the ricochets made me think that he had simply perhaps gotten lucky.  Or, as a friend at the concert suggested, stolen some of the better early bits from Lachenmann.  After that disruption, my listening-state of suspended disbelief was broken, and couldn’t be repaired.  I was waiting for it to end.

Leroux’s starting inauspiciously enough — the old new-music trick of “oooh, same note, different timbres!”  Then the spectral trick of “this middle-high note can be voiced to sound like an overtone of various low, clunky chords.”  I thought that the piece exploded into some nice ear-tickling colors thereafter, but the whole process seemed strangely mechanical, like the churning out of Spectral Piece #8761.  PPP didn’t justify its own existence to me.  I’ll stick with Tristan Murial and (especially) Gérard Grisey.

I liked the Pesson best.  Although it was the longest, it was the only piece I still cared about as it ended.  While parts were in the uncompromising post-Lachenmann idiom, other parts allowed scraps of tonal detritus to filter in: an E-flat major chord materializes out of clusters in the piano, certain cluster-tones hanging over like foreign particles sticking to it and corrupting it; a bizarrely repressed and sentimental turn of melody in the violin, suspended uneasily over a low piano bass note; etc.  I liked these bits because they seemed neither a Romantic yearning for prelapsarian innocence, nor a dismissive “ah, we were so naive back then!”  I like uneditorialized quotations like these — perhaps because I don’t think music ought to be didactic. (And, yes, I often find the use of quotations didactic.  Perhaps I’ll post on George Rochberg one day.)

The Ensemble was wise to put the Pesson last on the program; because of it, I left smiling.

Concerts

October 20, 2010

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